IT WAS only a matter of time. In truth the US has been trying to kill Osama bin Laden since August 1998, well before the 9/11 outrage which became synonymous with his name. In the aftermath of the August attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in which 263 died, President Bill Clinton bombed training camps in Afghanistan in what was acknowledged unofficially to be an attempt to kill the Saudi mastermind of al-Qaeda. The Wall Street Journal ran a piece days later entitled "The etiquette of killing bin Laden".
It has been a painful and bloody search and wait, but there is an apt historical symmetry to his demise now as the “Arab spring” travels its course and fellow Muslims find new, and, it appears, ultimately more successful roads to revolution and liberation through mass action rather than terror.
Al-Qaeda will soon no doubt seek to demonstrate in revenge attacks that it is still a formidable force, but it has been largely bypassed. And although bin Laden had united disparate militant groups from Egypt to Chechnya, from Yemen to the Philippines under its banner, his reactionary vision of an Islamic caliphate extending from Afghanistan across the world has singularly failed to capture the imagination of Arab popular opinion hankering for democracy.
The killing is undoubtedly both a huge political coup for President Obama and a psychological blow to al-Qaeda, but taking the head off the organisation will not kill the beast. Bin Laden, still a charismatic rallying figurehead for jihadists, had been largely in practice a symbolic figure in recent years and was reported to have had little direct operational role in a group that has also significantly decentralised. But his death will not end the threat from an increasingly potent and self-reliant string of regional al-Qaeda affiliates in north Africa and Yemen, and students of the organisation say it will have long prepared for this eventuality. The helm is likely to be taken by the Egyptian surgeon and his long-time deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in recent times the most visible face and voice of al-Qaeda. The fight will go on.
That bin Laden should be run to ground in a town just north of Islamabad is a considerable embarrassment to the Pakistan authorities, whatever their feelings about the unsanctioned US raid. Despite persistent and well-founded suspicions of collusion between Pakistan’s intelligence services (ISI) and al-Qaeda, the US has for the last decade contributed more than $1 billion a year to the country’s counter-terrorism operations. Its primary purpose was the killing or capture of bin Laden. Did Islamabad really not know he was living on their doorstep? Or does it have no control of the ISI, ever a law unto itself?
The US special forces team was under orders not to take him alive, as confirmed by a US national security official to Reuters. In truth an imprisoned bin Laden would have prompted violent hostage-taking bids to free him. That Washington took the view it did then is hardly surprising. But any liberal western democracy would find the tone of triumphalist demonstrations in New York and Washington for a shoot-to-kill policy understandable, in the circumstances, but disquieting.